NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB Video Card Review

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it
into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system
to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load
numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running
the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.9.2 at 640×480 resolution. We also ran Battlefield 3, 3DMark11 and Deus EX and averaged the peak results recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter for the gaming results.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 is supposed to be very power efficient, so this will be interested to check out. The AMD Radeon HD 6990 with Catalyst 12.4 WHQL drivers doesn’t play nice with Furmark in full-screen mode, so we will not be including those results.

Power Consumption Results: The total system power consumption of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 falls right between a single GTX 680 and a pair of GTX 680’s in SLI. Running the Furmark 1.9.2 burn-in the 680’s in SLI pulled 573 Watts while the GTX 690 was 105 Watts lower at 468 Watts. A single GTX 680 pulled only 352 Watts which is 116 Watts lower than the GTX 690. Looking at the power consumption average of the three games, it’s quite a similar story. The GTX 690 averaged 459 Watts, while the SLI system averaged 83 Watts higher and the single GTX 680 averaged 118 Watts less. The idle power consumption of the GeForce GTX 690 was right on par with the GTX 680’s in SLI. We expected to see slightly less since we are running a single PCB rather than a pair of them as we are in SLI.